I am happy to say that I finally made it far enough in the sign-up process to get a username and password on the embattled Healthcare.gov site. (And then I got stuck in a loop trying to add my family information and gave up for the day.)

One problem, however. I’ve been using the same username on my previous failed attempts, but this time, the system told me that username was already taken. Now, I used GPollowitz and other characters to create the username, so it is highly unlikely that there’s an identical username that somebody else is using. The system made me choose a new one before I could continue.

Now, I was never successful at getting past the security questions until today. Why would that old username be in the system? And if it is in the system, is HHS including it in their number of people who have created an account? If they are, their counts are meaningless.